Stuff to read while you're eating your cereal. A blog on history, archaeology, science, technology, and whatever else I happen to be interested in. Be sure to follow me on Twitter! @ModernCerealBox

About Me

I blog about politics for a living, so this is an outlet for all the non-political things I feel like writing about. Like my politics? Great. Glad to have you. That has nothing to do with this site. Hate my politics? That’s fine too because that has nothing whatsoever to do with this site.

This blog is an outlet for my thoughts on history, science, technology and whatever other story I happen to find interesting on the same day that I also feel like blogging. My posting schedule and topics will be sporadic, but hopefully interesting.

My background is in journalism, not science, engineering or history, so I try to reinforce my blogs on these topics with as many references to outside sources as possible. I write about these things because I enjoy reading about them, and I hope other people do too. If you see that I forgot to cite a source somewhere, you think I need to make a correction or you’re interested in learning more about a topic discussed on this blog, feel free to email me and let me know.

Thanks to my wife’s superb trip planning abilities, we end up going on a lot more cool trips to interesting locations that I’d possibly be able to manage on my own. Together we’ve traveled to England, Scotland, Italy, France, Puerto Rico, Mexico, as well as several islands in the Caribbean. Many of my posts are inspired by these vacations, as are the photos I’m slowly uploading to the “Travel Photos” page on this blog. All images used on any part of this blog are either ones I’ve taken myself or free use images downloaded from sites like Wikimedia Commons, unless otherwise specified in the caption.

Some shameless promoting of products that are in no way paying me to promote them: I’m a big fan of Coursera, a program that offers free, online courses, which I highly recommend. I’m supplementing my lack of a history background by taking actual courses from actual professors at actual colleges. It’s great for people like me who don’t have the time or money to go back to college, but want to learn more about things that interest them. So far, I’ve used this program to take courses on Roman Art and Archaeology, Ancient Greek History, Ancient Egypt, Osteoarchaeology.

I’m also a big fan of Duolingo, a free, language teaching website/app. I’ve used both their Italian and Spanish courses, but I’m focusing on Italian right now in preparation for another trip to Italy in late summer. I’ve also recently discovered the Coffee Break Italian and Slow Languages podcasts, which have been incredibly helpful in learning pronunciation.

Obviously, anything posted here does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer. In fact, some of the things I post about may be so obscure that most people don’t have opinions about them at all.

Please feel free to contact me or reply in the comments with any suggestions or corrections.